Rewrite a lot of the README.

The story about how we came to needing GetProcAddress functions isn't
that interesting, but the featureset is something that should be
(particularly when comparing to similar tools that exist).

Fixes #7
macos/v1.5.9
Eric Anholt 11 years ago
parent 880b6b39a5
commit edf5aedb6f
  1. 64
      README.md

@ -3,35 +3,24 @@ you.
It hides the complexity of dlopen(), dlsym(), glXGetProcAddress(),
eglGetProcAddress(), etc. from the app developer, with very little
knowledge needed on their part. Just read your GL specs and write
knowledge needed on their part. They get to read GL specs and write
code using undecorated function names like glCompileShader().
Don't forget to check for your extensions or versions being present
before you use them, just like before! We'll tell you what you forgot
to check for instead of just segfaulting, though.
Why does this library exist?
----------------------------
OpenGL on Linux (and other platforms) made some ABI decisions back in
the days when symbol versioning and dlsym() weren't as widely
available, that resulted in window-systems-specific APIs that looked
kind of like dlsym. They allowed you to build an app that required
OpenGL 1.2, but could optionally use features of OpenGL 1.4 if the
implementation made those available through the glXGetProcAddress()
(or other similarly-named) mechanism.
The downside is that the fixed OpenGL 1.2 ABI means that application
developers have to GetProcAddress() out every modern GL entrypoint
they want to use and stash that function pointer somewhere. Sometimes
this is done in a pretty way (like libGLEW), sometimes it is done in
an ad-hoc way (like most applications I've seen), but it's never done
as well as we think it could be done.
Additionally, the proliferation of OpenGL ABIs (desktop GL, GLESv1,
GLESv2) and window systems (GLX, AGL, WGL, all versus EGL) means that
an individual developer needs to know more and more about how to load
their classes symbols.
Features
--------
* Automatically initializes as new GL functions are used.
* GL 4.4 core and compatibility context support.
* GLES 1/2/3 context support.
* Knows about function aliases so (e.g.) glBufferData() can be used with
GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object implementations, along with GL 1.5+
implementations.
* EGL and GLX support.
* Can be mixed with non-epoxy GL usage.
Switching your code to using epoxy
----------------------------------
@ -47,6 +36,7 @@ with:
#include <epoxy/gl.h>
#include <epoxy/glx.h>
As long as epoxy's headers appear first, you should be ready to go.
Additionally, some new helpers become available, so you don't have to
write them:
@ -61,3 +51,31 @@ available ("GL_ARB_texture_buffer_object", for example).
Note that this is not terribly fast, so keep it out of your hot paths,
ok?
Why not use libGLEW?
--------------------
GLEW has several issues:
* Doesn't know about aliases of functions (There are 5 providers of
glPointParameterfv, for example, and you don't want to have to
choose which one to call when they're all the same).
* Doesn't support GL 3.2+ core contexts
* Doesn't support GLES.
* Doesn't support EGL.
* Has a hard-to-maintain parser of extension specification text
instead of using the old .spec file or the new .xml.
* Has significant startup time overhead when glewInit() autodetects
the world.
* User-visible multithreading support choice for win32.
The motivation for this project came out of previous use of libGLEW in
[piglit](http://piglit.freedesktop.org/). Other GL dispatch code
generation projects had similar failures. Ideally, piglit wants to be
able to build a single binary for a test that can run on whatever
context or window system it chooses, not based on link time choices.
We had to solve some of GLEW's problems for piglit and solving them
meant replacing every single piece of GLEW, so we built
piglit-dispatch from scratch. And since we wanted to reuse it in
other GL-related projects, this is the result.

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